More words may have been written about Jasper Johns than about any other American artist who isn’t Andy Warhol. Critical verbiage spumes in the wake of a sixty-some-year career (Johns is eighty-eight) that began with revolutionary paintings of flags, targets, sets of numbers, and maps—or, per a standard paradox, paintings that virtually are those things. Many of the writers, who now include Alexi Worth, a contributor to the catalogue of a show of recent work by Johns at the Matthew Marks Gallery, remark with some ratio of awe and exasperation on the artist’s taciturnity. He doesn’t—will not, don’t waste your breath asking him—discuss his works. This rankles, because what he makes seems positively to pant for discussion. Johns is a riddler, even—or especially—when his themes are blatant. In the present show, they run to death and sorrow, with a fillip of political history. There are more than two dozen small vertical pictures of individual, standing skeletons or bodies with their bones revealed, presenting themselves like visitors in doorways. Most sport flat, Buster Keaton-ish hats: comical but not funny. I like those. I’m not so sure about the dozen or so paintings and drawings derived from a photograph that was published in Life, in 1965, of a young Marine helicopter gunner in Vietnam after a disastrous mission during which a crewmate was killed.
Face in hands, the stricken soldier contorts in agony, evidently weeping and plainly oblivious of being observed, alone in an equipment shed. His name and that of the intrusive photojournalist appear on some works in the series, in Johns’s familiar stencilled, paint-thick lettering: in the fullest versions, “Farley Breaks Down—after Larry Burrows.” (Lance Corporal James Farley survived the war. Burrows did not.) Perhaps cued by Farley’s camouflage uniform, Johns renders the scene to, or beyond, the limit of legibility, in various mediums, chiefly puddled ink and watercolor on plastic. As always, his beautiful touch—as patient as solitaire, as unpredictable as roulette—simultaneously establishes and etherealizes the image. You can seek to make out the figure or contemplate how Johns painted it. The wiring of eyesight in your brain won’t let you do both at once. You may find yourself in a state of doing neither, your neuronal toggle stuck, buzzing, between the two functions.
Ever since his first painting of the American flag, begun in 1954, Johns has mastered a trick of replicating schematic motifs with an expressive hand that feels indifferent to what it describes. The image blares, harshly. The brushwork meanders, tenderly. Attempts to make sense of the disjuncture and of what it may entail or suggest fill library shelves of exegetic prose. But it’s not all that complicated. The meanings of Johns’s art are pantomimes of meaning: cerebral hooks baited with visual seduction. His subjects aren’t enigmas. They are dead-end allusions. Dealing with them is like being conducted to a certain place and looking back to discover that your guide has vanished. Johns’s muteness about his work is a refusal to take responsibility for how it affects us. Fair enough. The payoff is a reliably powerful condensation of a perceptual dynamic—a dance between seeing and understanding—that is common to all successful painting. But now and then the effect feels coy in the passive-aggressive way of people who are quick to let you know that they have secrets they won’t tell. If you are like me, you may alternate between revering Johns and itching to slap him.
It’s echt American, this art. Johns’s early paintings declared independence from European influence like nothing before them. Incredulous on this score, some observers at the time took refuge in calling him Neo-Dada, but there’s an Atlantic Ocean’s worth of distance between his work, which is dead serious even when playful, and, say, the satiric displacements of common objects by Marcel Duchamp. Tellingly, Johns has never been as esteemed in other countries as he is on these shores. To my mind, his art jibes with America’s chief contribution to philosophy, the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. It is about how art works work. In addition, despite Johns’s fastidiously ironic detachment, the early paintings could seem to symbolize American imperial confidence at its peak and on the march, waging the Cold War. We know where that went. The “Farley Breaks Down” pictures could be seen to acknowledge the subsequent horrors of national hubris, most irreparably in the blood vat of Vietnam. But here I am verging on yet another wordy thesis about the intentions of Jasper Johns, which, to be authoritative, would need confirming testimony from him. Fat chance.
Both more abstruse than Johns and far more lovable is the Iranian-American sculptor, conceptualist, and political philosopher Siah Armajani, the subject of a fascinating retrospective of paintings, drawings, sculptures, architectural models, charts, computer printouts, a video, a slide show, and whatnot at the Met Breuer, and also represented by a terrific temporary installation in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Armajani, seventy-nine years old, is preposterously under-recognized, even in the art world, considering the local successes of the seventy-odd site-specific works he has made since 1968, in eighteen states, plus the District of Columbia, and five European nations. These tend to put colorful structures of abstracted architectural elements in service to civic functions: bridges, gardens, gazebos, open-air reading rooms. Some were temporary, but many are permanent. There’s one on Staten Island, “Lighthouse and Bridge” (1996)—an elevated walkway to the ferry, featuring a skeletal tower topped with a stained-glass lamp and, elsewhere, the inscription of a poem by Wallace Stevens—and a collaborative contribution to the adornment, in 1989, of the riverside plaza of Battery Park City, also with snippets of poetry, celebrating Manhattan, by Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara. Armajani’s stated theory of such work is radiantly sensible: “Public sculpture attempts to fill the gap between art and public to make art public and artists citizens again.”
There are any number of reasons for Armajani’s relative obscurity. He has lived in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul since 1960, when he emigrated from Tehran—none too soon, in the light of official attention to his doings as an activist against the Shah—to attend Macalester College. Uncomfortable with commerce, he’s less pleased to sell works than to give them away to people he likes. A penchant for befuddling mathematical, scientific, and literary arcana can rather daunt a viewer, with installations that invite the perusal of books ranging from the hard and social sciences to poetry. Politically, he identifies with historical anarchism, having dedicated pieces to the memories of Emma Goldman and Sacco and Vanzetti. (Though Armajani is from a Christian family, he values Islamic traditions—in early works, he incorporated calligraphed Quranic texts and even a militant speech, from 1963, by the Ayatollah Khomeini—but not the theocracy that took hold with the Iranian Revolution of 1979.) Then, there’s the uncategorizable salad of his sculptural styles, harvested from Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus, American vernacular architecture, and sheer fantasy. All in all, he recalls no predecessor except, perhaps, Buckminster Fuller, minus Fuller’s grandiose self-promotion. In person, Armajani is buoyant and kind.
The Met Breuer show includes works from the late sixties that take to extremes an infatuation with technology which marked some conceptual art of the time. Already employing computers in 1969, Armajani programmed one to churn out numerical values between zero and one. (Don’t look at me for what sense that makes!) The resulting stack of dot-matrix printouts is nearly nine feet high. He planned a tower that, were it ever built, would cast a morning shadow across the full length of North Dakota (“I want the calculations accepted as art,” he stated) and one that would extend forty-eight thousand miles from Earth into space (the right height, he figured, for countering gravity with centrifugal force). More grounded engineering then came to preoccupy him. “Dictionary for Building” is the collective title of scores of delightful little handmade models, mostly in raw cardboard, that explore such possible variations of architectural and design elements as a double Murphy bed, folding out into two bunks, and several configurations of porch steps. Never meant to be executed, “Dictionary” propagates flurries of ideas at the margins of professional practice.
In Brooklyn Bridge Park, “Bridge Over Tree,” which re-creates one of Armajani’s first site-specific sculptures, from 1970, in Minneapolis, is what its title denotes: a ninety-one-foot-long, shingle-roofed span made of gray-painted wood and metal, with open-worked trusses for sides. (The 2019 iteration was commissioned by the Public Art Fund.) You can enter from either end and walk along a slope that rises gently to steep stairs in the middle, leading up to a narrow landing and then down toward the opposite end. The stairs are required for the bridge to clear a single thriving arborvitae evergreen, planted beneath it; the roof spikes seventeen feet for the purpose. The effect is a darling symbol of culture deferring to nature. Sculpturally, the piece’s orientation to the converging V of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and its angular rhymes with buildings on the far side of the ever-seething river make for a mix of visual and physical, spectacular and visceral splendors. “Bridge Over Tree” will better the world a trifle until it is taken down (must it be?), in September. ♦
